ISSUE Project Room: Theater Online

History of Productions View Current and Upcoming

MATA Interval: Moby Dick, Extracts on Death and Other Curiosities | Open: 02/21/14 Close: 02/21/14

Composers collective West 4th New Music (W4) and Contemporaneous chamber orchestra join forces with MATA to create an evening-length oratorio inspired by Herman Melville's classic Moby Dick. With a libretto using only text from the book itself, the composers of W4 Matt Frey, Molly Herron, Tim Hansen and Ruben Naeff piece together an interpretation of the story that focuses on Melville's literary themes outside of the context of a linear narrative. Each composer takes on contrasting sections, their compositions collectively exploring the story of both the danger and determination inherent in pursuing one all-consuming quest. Contemporaneous are conducted by David Bloom.

New York-based visual artist Andy Cahill creates visuals, with projections taking inspiration from visual representations of the drawings Rockwell Kent created for the 1930 Modern Library publication of Moby Dick.

West 4th New Music (W4) is a Brooklyn-based collective of composers producing innovative concerts of new music. As an organization, W4's mission is to promote contemporary composers and performers and to widen the reach of music that challenges and enriches its audience and creators.

Music.Classical

Heatsick / Ned Rothenberg | Open: 02/14/14 Close: 02/14/14

A special valentine's day concert at ISSUE Project Room features Berlin-based electronic musician Steven Warwick, AKA Heatsick, and composer/performer Ned Rothenberg. Combining a palette of sources from early Chicago house mixtapes through to musique concrète and psychedelia, Heatsick proposes a live dance music that expands and unlocks the senses. Ned Rothenberg performs solo improvisations, engaging a range of wind instruments as melodic, rhythmic and harmonic engines.

Heatsick is the project of Berlin-based musician and visual artist Steven Warwick, also known for his work in the electronic duo, Birds of Delay. Heatsick's entrancing live show is created in real time based upon loops that are moulded, stretched and reduced to interlink, nestling and merging with one another in a similar way to his visual artwork, where objects and media combine and coalesce in an environment inviting the viewer's participation. Combining a palette of sources from early Chicago house mixtapes (in sound, texture and mixing technique) through to musique concrète and psychedelia, Heatsick proposes a live dance music that expands and unlocks the senses: his use of limited resources to produce an immersive, maximalist sound environment often stretched beyond three hours and augmented by elements of his broader art practice for his Extended Play performance series has been favourably received at venues, clubs and festivals across the world including Berghain/Panorama Bar, Unsound, MoMa and Novas Frequencias in Rio. Heatsick's most recent release, Re-engineering (PAN, 2013) is described as a "cybernetic poem", indulging us in the mores of hypnotic dance music while holding a critical, and at times satirical, lens toward the culture writ large.

Composer/Performer Ned Rothenberg has been internationally acclaimed for both his solo and ensemble music, presented for the past 33 years on 5 continents. He performs primarily on alto saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet, and the shakuhachi - an endblown Japanese bamboo flute. His solo work utilizes an expanded palette of sonic language, creating a kind of personal idiom all its own. In an ensemble setting, he leads the trio Sync, with Jerome Harris, guitars and Samir Chatterjee, tabla, works with the Mivos string quartet playing his Quintet for Clarinet and Strings and collaborates around the world with fellow improvisors. Recent recordings include this Quintet, The World of Odd Harmonics, Ryu Nashi (new music for shakuhachi), and Inner Diaspora, all on John Zorn's Tzadik label, as well as Live at Roulette with Evan Parker, and The Fell Clutch, on Rothenberg's Animul label.

Music.Experimental

Michael Snow / Alan Licht / Aki Onda trio | Open: 02/04/14 Close: 02/04/14

The trio of Michael Snow, Alan Licht and Aki Onda achieves the all-too-rare alchemy of strong separate identities and shared aesthetics into a holistic unit. Snow, who began his career as a pianist, performs on the CAT synthesizer, with Licht on guitar and Onda on cassette recorders and electronics. Originally formed in 2005, they have since New York, Toronto, London, Barcelona, and Madrid, and released the album "Five A's, Two C's, One D, One E, Two H's, Three I's, One K, Three L's, One M, Three N's, Two O's, One S, One T, One W" in 2008 (Victo).

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Starting as a professional jazz pianist in the 50s, Canadian Michael Snow has since achieved fame as a visual artist, creating the iconic "Walking Woman" image in the 60s as well as the genre-defining structural film Wavelength. He has continued to pursue music as a free improvisor, after arguably mid-wifing the form in the sessions for the soundtrack to his 1964 film New York Eye and Ear Control with Albert Ayler and others. Snow has performed with Evan Parker, Roswell Rudd, Derek Bailey and Tony Conrad as well as being a founding member of the CCMC (Snow, Paul Dutton and John Oswald) and playing frequent solo concerts. His photography, videos, films, paintings, and sculpture continue to be exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide.

A New York based nomadic musician, composer and visual artist Aki Onda has released a string of exquisite solo albums featuring contributions from musicians as diverse as Blixa Bargeld and Linda Sharrock. These include Cassette Memories series and the highly acclaimed albums Ancient & Modern, Bon Voyage! and South of The Border on which Onda composes with multiple cassette recorders and electronics, using sounds he has field-recorded himself as a diary. Onda has collaborated with artists such as Ken Jacobs, Paul Clipson, Loren Connors, MV Carbon, Noël Akchoté, Jean-François Pauvros, Jac Berrocal, Lionel Marchett and Akio Suzuki. Onda was a 2012 Artist-In-Residence at ISSUE Project Room.

Alan Licht has appeared on over 75 recordings that range from minimalist composition to indie rock to free improvisation. He is currently guitarist in Lee Ranaldo and the Dust and one-third of "talk rock" band Title TK with Cory Archangel and Howie Chen. He is also the author of Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories (Rizzoli, 2007) and the editor of Will Oldham on Bonnie 'Prince' Billy (Faber & Faber/W.W. Norton, 2012). A long-time fan of Michael Snow, he interviewed him in the late 90s and subsequently performed with him at festivals in Canada and Chicago. Around the same time, he began playing duos with Aki Onda (an album, Everydays, was released by Family Vineyard in 2008) and was reminded of Snow's filmmaking when he heard Onda's 2003 album Bon Voyage!.

Music.Experimental

R. Stevie Moore / Gary Wilson | Open: 01/24/14 Close: 01/24/14

ISSUE presents two fiercely independent pillars of DIY rock: R. Stevie Moore and Gary Wilson. Lo-fi trailblazer Moore performs solo and unplugged. Wilson revisits his own avant garde and access TV performance roots with lightly arranged improvisations over abstract displays. Extended versions of his more non-musical hits from You Think You Really Know Me, as well as solo numbers selected from his own catalog and the outsider realms of instrumental warp lounge restaurant classics are performed with guest accompaniments by The Blind Dates.

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Improviser, composer, arranger, producer, musical conceptualist, comedy writer, vocal stylist, filmmaker, sketchpad artist, drama example, self-taught instrumentalist and bon vivant, R. Stevie Moore was born 1952 in Nashville, TN to famed Elvis bass player Bob Moore. Considered a seminal pioneer in the DIY ethic, since '66 Moore has recorded nearly 2,000 songs on over 400 very original homemade albums of alarmingly idiosyncratic variety and styles. Remaining virtually unknown, he quietly resided in New Jersey as curator of his own museum. Until now... based back in Tennessee, and touring the planet LOUDLY SHOUTING!

Gary Wilson emerged from New York's DIY movement with 1977's proto-New Wave masterpiece You Think You Really Know Me, an extraordinarily bizarre and personal record which has been known to suck unprepared new listeners in like a drug and never let go. Shortly after its limited release its creator simply vanished. In the 25-year wake before he was found again, Wilson's small-town opus had spread by word-of-mouth, inspiring a new generation with his bizarre songs and personal musical vision until the re-release You Think You Really Know Me in 2002 brought him back to the public eye. Wilson has continued making music in the years following his "disappearance", chronicling his obsessions and angst in songs equal parts Prince and Pee Wee HermanJoe Jackson and Charlie Brown. Bursting with electro-funk, synth rock, lounge, soul, and avant-garde jazz, Wilson's songs celebrate our inner ickiness, silliness and grooviness, the romance and randiness of born-losers.

Music.Experimental

Josephine Foster, Victor Herrero, Ed Askew | Open: 01/22/14 Close: 01/22/14

ISSUE is pleased to host an evening with three extraordinary singer songwriters: Josephine Foster, Victor Herrero and Ed Askew. Askew plays new songs with his trio, joined at times by Foster and Herrero, who each perform solo sets.

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Esteemed for her timeless and arresting voice, <a href="http://www.josephinefoster.info/" target="_blank">Josephine Foster</a>'s rock and folk veiled work has reimagined a disparate spectrum of references, notably German Lieder, children's music, Tin Pan alley, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson. After relocating to the remote Spanish city of Cádiz, Foster's attentions turned to the country's rich musical traditions in two Spanish-language releases with The Victor Herrero Band Anda Jaleo, a resetting of Garcia Lorcas songbook (2010) and Perlas (2012). Foster's most recent solo release, 2013's I'm a Dreamer (Fire Records) draws on early jazz, bringing vaudevillian piano and tinges of Nashville into the mix.

<a href="http://victorherrero.bandcamp.com/" target="_blank">Victor Herrero</a> was introduced to music in his childhood while living in the famous monastery Franco erected in a mountain valley west of Madrid (El Valle de los Caídos). There he learned to sing Gregorian and Mozarabic chant under the guidance of Benedictine monks. Following his first solo album, Connotaciones para Piano (Sello Autor - SGAE, 2006) as"Victor Cicely", Herrero met his wife Josephine Foster. He plays lead guitar on her albums This Coming Gladness (Bo'Weavil Recordings, 2008) as well as on her two albums Blood Rushing (Fire Records, 2012) and Im a Dreamer (Fire Records, 2013). In 2013, Herrero released his third solo album, Estampida, a collection of original songs written in Spanish, on Foehn Records and Windbell Records Japan.

<a href="http://edaskew.bandcamp.com/" target="_blank">Ed Askew</a> Band has just returned from a enthusiastically received three-week European tour which included sold out shows at Jazzhouse in Copenhagen and the Le Guess Who festival in Utrecht. Best-known for his 1969 album Ask the Unicorn (ESP-Disk) on which he played the 10-stringed tiple Askew has been making new music in New York for over two decades. Following Little Eyes (DeStijl), Imperfiction (Drag City), and a tour in support of Bill Callahan, Askew released For the World in 2013 on Tin Angel Records. The album was produced by Jerry DeCicca (The Black Swans) and features Marc Ribot, Sharon van Etten, and Mary Lattimore.

Music.Experimental

Ten Years Alive: On Nature and Our Supplements, In poems and in pictures | Open: 09/25/13 Close: 09/25/13

Today, we approach Nature cautiously, altered by highly refined drugs. We ingest, inject, imbibe various medications and pharmaceuticalssupplementsto keep the body alive, awake, attuned to ever changing bodily states. All ducks are dabblers. Sunrise and shadows falling across the forest floor, waves upon the shorebeach walks and park prowlingour pockets filled with pills; tote bags carrying vials, syringes or bottles; news reports of bee colony collapse, icebergs melting, plastic patch growing, atmospheric turbulence, ocean temperatures rising... Where's the awe?

Organized by Gregg Bordowitz with Ari Banias, Corrine Fitzpatrick and friends TBA.

Arts.Literary

Littoral: Short Takes From Ride A Cockhorse By Raymond Kennedy | Open: 09/21/12 Close: 09/21/12

Stephen Ruddy NYRB Classics Present a Special BBF Bookend Event:

Stephen Ruddy, director of Upright Citizens Brigade's "Gravid Water" directs a dramatic reading of Brooklyn author Raymond Kennedy's darkly comic 1991 novel Ride a Cockhorse, recently reprinted by NYRB Classics. Forty-five-year-old Frances Fitzgibbons has gone from sweet-tempered bank loan officer to insatiable force of nature almost overnight. Suddenly she's brazenly seducing the high-school drum major, taking over her boss's office, firing anyone who crosses her, inspiring populist fervor, and publicly announcing plans to crush her local rivals en route to dominating the entire banking industry in the northeast.

Stephen Ruddy has directed Amy Poehler, Michael Cera, Jason Sudeikis, Megan Mullally, David Cross, Nick Offerman, Cristin Milioti, Scott Adsit, and other theater and comedy luminaries in Gravid Water, the show he created for the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in 2004. The show is performed monthly in UCB's NY and LA theaters. Stephen also directs for The 52nd Street Project and NYU Graduate Acting's FreePlay series, and is a member of the curatorial committee of The Moth, the Peabody Award-winning storytelling organization.

Established in 2006, ISSUE's Littoral program is a free public reading series spotlighting writers experimenting with new forms and approaches to poetry, fiction, and essays. Responding to a declining network of support for innovative experimental literature outside academic institutions, Littoral serves as a central hub for fostering cutting-edge writers, publishers, and literary journals.

Arts.Literary